Mary Reid

I have been watching the news from Zimbabwe on a hourly basis. It would be quite extraordinary if that despicable Mugabe could be defeated through democratic processes, however much he attempts to rig the results.

As I write it appears that the 24 Parliamentary constituencies declared so far are equally split between Mugabe's Zanu-PF and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

One chilling piece of information in the latest report from the BBC is this

In the north-western town of Hwange, people are anxiously listening to radios, in case results are broadcast but not everyone can afford their own radio, so they have to gather around other people's sets. But public gatherings of more than four people are illegal under Zimbabwean law, so they disperse as soon as they see any police officers.

No public gatherings of more than four people? Standing around sharing a radio is a crime?

At the end of 2007 I listed my eight wishes for 2008. In no particular order, they were .....

1. Lots of positive media coverage for Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats
2. Health and happiness for young Eli, and for Michelle and Jay's baby when she arrives
3. Recognition by the Anglican Communion of the validity of gay and lesbian relationships
4. Removal of Mugabe and the installation of a democratic government in Zimbabwe
5. A just and peaceful resolution of the situation in Gaza
6. Unqualified acceptance of the threat of climate change by the USA and a commitment to exceed the Kyoto targets
7. Greater democratic participation in local government in the UK
8. More older people on Facebook (we don't need the Saga version)

No 4 is now a strong possibility.

I've received my polling card for the London elections on May 1st. 

If you haven't had yours yet then either it is in the post (give it a day or two) or you're not registered to vote.

So what should you do if you'd like to vote but don't appear to be registered - or you suspect that your polling card may have gone astray?  Go to this page on Kingston Council website.

The deadline for registration is 16th April so you do have time to sort it out.

By the way, you can vote in the London elections if

• you live in a London borough
• you will be 18 years or older on 1st May
• you are a British, EU citizen or Commonwealth citizen

BUT you must be on the electoral register of your local Council first.

There's more detail about the London elections here.

Over on Liberal Democrat Voice, I've posted an item on Nick Clegg's first 100 days as party leader.

It's a good time to mention Young Kingston again.

This is the charitable fund that I set up during my mayoral year. It gives grants to young people to help them carry out projects that will benefit the community.

Young Kingston has some unique features:

• It can give grants to children from the age of 5 - the upper limit is usually 19 but can be extended for young people with disabilities
• It offers support in the form of Young Kingston Advisers who can help the young people at any stage of planning or doing their projects
• The Grants Panel will consist of young people

So - empowerment all round!

All the information you need, plus application guidelines and forms can be found on www.youngkingston.org.uk

Well, I'm back into normal mode again, starting with Full Council last night.

It was all rather odd, although it began well with everyone united against the closure of six Post Offices in the Borough.  Lots of people seems to have been collecting petitions and two large ones were presented by Sean Duggan (Editor of the Surrey Comet) and Susan Kramer MP - with getting on for 5000 signatures between them. The debate emphasised all the reasons why Post Offices need to be retained, used and boosted with further services.

Then Cllr Steve Mama claimed that he had a hotline to the Government and that we could expect some concessions - if this is true then it is very welcome, but I'm not holding my breath.

Unfortunately Cllr Mama reverted to his normal way of working by insulting Cllr Sheila Griffin when she indicated that she wished to speak in a later debate.

That debate was on a motion brought by the Conservatives, which was based on a misunderstanding of Brian Paddick's manifesto proposals for London. This is what Brian says about congestion charging:

A Congestion Charge should do what it says it will do: tackle congestion. Keeping traffic moving will reduce congestion. In order to do this Brian proposes:

...

Ask TfL to conduct a feasibility study into introducing a 24/7 £10 Greater London Congestion Charge (GLCC). The Charge will be targeted at long-distance car-driving commuters encouraging them to use public transport instead and getting them to consider the cost of their journey in terms of congestion and pollution. Cars travelling from outside the zone to local shopping centres or those visiting locally will be exempt, together with all cars registered to an address within Greater London and commercial vehicles. Any such Scheme Order will be subject to statutory consultation and in this case including local authority areas bordering the GLA boundary.

There will be wide consultation, with one of two measures implemented to avoid shopping centres on the periphery of Greater London losing trade from people living just outside the boundary, who might be unwilling to pay the GLCC. The first option is a distinct buffer zone outside the Greater London boundary, the residents of which would be exempt from the charge. The second option is moving the boundary of the Greater London Congestion Charge zone so that outlying areas, including the major shopping centres on the periphery of Greater London, are excluded from the fee-paying zone.

The Conservative motion was "This Council rejects the Lib Dem proposal to charge £10 for vehicles entering the London area from the Counties. This charge will have a detrimental effect on businesses in our Town Centre".

Cllr David Cunningham started off the debate and seemed very surprised that we agreed with most of what he said. Cllr Derek Osbourne, the Leader of the Council, then explained that the motion was based on a headline understanding of the policy not on the detail, which, of course, would protect Kingston. In spite of that, one Conservative after another gave their prepared speeches attacking the non-existent proposal!  Oh dear!

Earlier we had seen another inappropriate use of Council time by the Conservatives. 

Question Time at Full Council is the opportunity for councillors to pose questions to senior members of any party. The questions are submitted in advance, so councillors can do some research before the meeting. But the questioner can follow up with a supplementary question - the sting in the tail - which has to be answered off-the-cuff. 

Cllr Derek Osbourne asked this question of Cllr Howard Jones, Leader of the Opposition:

In your Budget speech, you outlined your opposition to borrowing in order to finance capital investment.  How would you have funded the £12 million investment in roads, pavements and street lighting which has taken place across the Borough since 2003?

Howard Jones spoke for 15 minutes about all sorts of things - in fact, I think it was the Budget speech that he realised he should have made back at Budget Council. (You may remember that he did not offer any alternative proposals and appeared to have written his speech before the proposals were published).

The Mayor, and other councillors, repeatedly asked him to answer the question. He kept saying he would, then went on to other topics. I lost focus and don't actually remember him saying what he would have done - I suppose I'll have to trawl through the transcript of his answer when the minutes are published on the Council website. At the end Derek Osbourne had no appetite for asking a supplementary question!

The problem with all this is that only 30 minutes are allowed for Question Time, so Cllr Jones took up half the time making a speech that was mainly irrelevant. Other questions then had to be ditched. Unfortunately, Standing Orders don't put a time limit on answers to questions, but I have never heard one that lasted more than a few minutes before.

There is a wonderful word for this sort of time-wasting: filibuster

The Easter long weekend is starting, and my family have come to visit, so I am taking a break from blogging for a few days.

Have a good weekend.

I promised yesterday that I'd write about ways to reduce your Council Tax bill. To be fair, these do not apply to everyone, but if you are entitled to these discounts then you most certainly should be getting them.  So here we go:

1. Are you the only adult in your home? If so you are entitled to a discount of 25% on your Council Tax. And when you count up the adults you can exclude students even if they are over 18.  There are also quite a number of other people who you can exclude - they are listed on page 8 of the booklet that comes with your Council Tax bill, or see this page on the Council website.

2. Are you a full-time student or student nurse? Then you don't pay any Council Tax at all. See this page on the Council website.

3. Is your property exempted? There are all kinds of exemptions, which mean that Council Tax is not payable on the property. These mostly apply when the property is empty. See pages 9 and 10 of the booklet with your Council Tax bill, or this page on the Council website.

4. Are you entitled to Council Tax Benefit or Housing Benefit? There's a neat calculator on the Council website which will help you to work out whether you qualify. It is really worth applying as you can get up to 100% of your Council Tax and rent refunded. You can phone the Guildhall on 020 8547 5198 during office hours for advice.

You can contact the Council Tax office about any of this.

My Council Tax bill has just arrived this morning. Not that it brought any surprises since I was at the Budget Council meeting last month - the one when the Conservatives didn't appear to have read the proposals, and didn't offer any alternatives.

Ahead of that, I had been involved in discussions about the budget going back to last summer. I think it's worth explaining how the Council arrives at the figures.

Kingston Council gets its income from two main sources - a central government grant and Council Tax. The total budget for 2008-2009 is around £114 million.

The grant from central government for this year, known as the Revenue Support Grant, was the worst ever for a generation. It came to £36 million.  That is just 31% of the total needed.

For reasons no-one seems to understand Kingston gets a far smaller grant than most other boroughs - the other outer London Boroughs get, on average, 50% of the amount they need to run their services from central government. This has been a constant complaint by all the political parties at Kingston.

That £36 million amounts to just £232 per resident.  In comparison, Hammersmith and Fulham get £683 per resident, so it's no wonder they have been able to actually reduce Council Tax this year.

Now you might think that business rates would bring a lot of income into the Borough, given our thriving shopping centres, service industries and industrial estates. But in fact, all the business rates go into a central pool which is then redistributed across the country.

So although Kingston raises around £68 million in business rates, only £28 million of it comes back, tucked up in the Revenue Support Grant. This year £40 million of the rates generated by our healthy local economy has been transferred to less successful councils in the north of England.

Back to Council Tax. The rest of the £114 million in the budget has to be raised by Council Tax - a total of £78 million.

In fact, the costs have gone up by more than this, so the only way it can be kept even at that level is by making all sorts of savings. The Council has been through a painstaking process of reviewing many of the services it provides, looking for ways of investing in the services with top priority and being more efficient through combining resources across the board. Nevertheless, 115 jobs have been cut.

There is no relief on the horizon either, because Kingston has already been told that the central government grant is going to be even worse for the next two years.

The only (relatively) good news in all this is that Council Tax increase in Kingston has been kept below the level of inflation for the first time for very many years.

Tomorrow I'll write about ways in which you can reduce the amount of Council Tax that you have to pay.

Well - do try out this awareness test.

(Thanks to Will Howells for spotting it).

We had some excellent news this week about the Hook Centre. The creche area on the ground floor of the old CAB building is to become a Children's Centre.

This will be the second Children's Centre in the Neighbourhood, to add to the one in Castle Hill Primary. But this is pretty unusual in not being located in a school.

The Centre will offer a whole range of services to familes with children from 0 to 5 years old, plus activities like a Homework Club for older ones.

This news was revealed at the special Neighbourhood meeting this week on schools and the community.

You'll be able to find out more next Tuesday 18th March at the normal Neighbourhood meeting when there is an item about the Hook Centre on the agenda. The meeting will be at 7.30pm in - appropriately enough - the Hook Centre.

It's a pretty long agenda, so if you are especially interested in this item, or any other, make sure you fill in a pink slip when you arrive and we will take the most popular items first.

In the Surrey Comet's Gossip Onlooker section this week, I spotted the story from my blog about the Lib Dem couple who met through their blogs.

But I then noticed an even odder item about loos in the Guildhall - and the penny dropped! (Couldn't resist that....)

On the first floor of the Guildhall there are two toilets with the original 1930s panels proclaiming them for the use of Gentlemen and Lady Members Only. Councillors used to wear long blue robes for Council meetings and ceremonial occasions, and these were stored in wardrobes in the rooms. So the rooms offered storage and changing facilities as well as loos.

Now the Liberal Democrats and Labour councillors (when we had them) gave up wearing robes many, many years ago. The Conservatives did continue to wear them for civic events, giving an unwarranted impression of seniority. However, they seem to have quietly dropped the practice in the last year or so. 

I have long questioned the need for Members Only loos, but rather than waste Council time on such a trivial issue I have been pleased to see that the people who work in the Guildhall simply ignore the signs and make use of them.

Or at least they did until last week, when a Conservative councillor complained that he was having to share the urinals with people who work in the main Guildhall building (where the Chief Executive has his office), and apparently an email was sent to all staff telling them to stop the practice.

This manages to be both ridiculous, and very offensive to the staff who work for the Council.

The first the rest of us knew about this was when we saw the new green notices on the doors ordering staff not to use them. I was popping in on Monday, with another councillor, and we immediately removed the notices from the doors to the female loos. (Yes, it was me....)

So will the Conservative councillor who thinks loo apartheid is appropriate please identify himself?

Woman & Home magazine has a page and a half on the Rose Theatre this month. And I'm rather chuffed because it includes an interview with me, after one with the great Sir Peter Hall. (Unfortunately they haven't posted this piece on the magazine's website)

But it is all rather odd, because the writer seems to be under the impression that the ORIGINAL Rose, the one that Shakespeare worked in, was built out here in (then) rural Kingston! It talks about our campaign to protect the area from redevelopment and to rebuild the theatre on the original site. I can't imagine how she managed to get that idea from interviews with Peter, me or Katie Randerson.

So, to set the record straight, the sixteenth century theatre was located in Southwark, just round the corner from the current re-creation of Shakespeare's Globe.

The design of Kingston's Rose Theatre was inspired by the original Rose. It has the same footprint, it has a stage and galleries that match the first one as closely as possible. But unlike the Globe, it is a modern interpretation of the space, including all the lighting and sound technology that you would expect, comfortable seating and, thank goodness, a roof.

There's a rather odd headshot of me in the article, taken from a picture that I'm rather proud of, so here it is in full:

I've just got back home from Liverpool, and here is my own view of Nick Clegg's speech today.

He gave an excellent performance - at times funny, but with immense conviction.  You can watch it on the BBC site from this page.

When I interviewed him during the leadership contest, and wrote about it under the title Clever Cleggs, I commented: "This is a man of high energy, who speaks fast and thinks on his feet. His commitment to Liberalism is unquestionable, not least because of his palpable enthusiasm for its core principles."  All that was evident today, but now coupled with a confidence and public charisma that show that he has the makings of a great leader.

That posting about him followed me to the Gender Balance Blogging Awards. I was rather embarrassed to learn a couple of weeks ago that it had been shortlisted in the category for Best Blog Post by a Female Liberal Democrat. Embarrassed because I had already been asked to be the speaker at the awards event yesterday evening! Fortunately, and not surprisingly, it didn't win. Jo Christie-Smith achieved that with a posting What should MPs look like?, in which she talks, amongst other things, about the excellent role model offered by a female Finnish MP.

All the rest of the winners are listed here and you can hear everyone who spoke (including me) in a podcast here!

It was a really enjoyable occasion, not least because I got to meet a number of Lib Dem bloggers for the first time, even though I felt I knew them well already through blogs, comments and emails.

In the bar afterwards I discovered that Lib Dem Blogs is gaining a reputation as a dating agency - at least one couple have met through their blogs, and another well-known blogging couple announced their engagement through it.

Whilst we were all gossiping Nick Clegg came over and joined in the conversation. This is definitely a new style of leadership - I can't remember a previous leader chatting so easily and naturally with everyone, and especially not the night before his big speech.

That is the theme for a special South of the Borough Neighbourhood meeting next week. We'll be getting a chance to hear about the developments around here - the new buildings for Chessington Community College and St Mary's Primary, and the flourishing Children's Centre at Castle Hill.

But what will make it even more interesting is the work of the School Cluster. Now you may not have heard of this, but behind the scenes all the people who provide services for children in the Neighbourhood have had in depth discussions about how to provide joined-up services to families and children. The School Cluster includes in its meetings all the schools in the Neighbourhood, plus health care professionals, librarians, police, social workers, child care managers etc.

The meeting on Wednesday will be an opportunity to find out about their thinking, and, of course, ask any questions. This ties in very well with our intention to develop a Neighbourhood Community Plan, driven by the people who live here.

The meeting will be at 7.30pm in the  Hook Centre. Everyone is welcome to attend.

Ken Livingstone's adviser, Lee Jasper has now been fired resigned. I wrote something about the background to this story a couple of weeks ago.

According to the Guardian, Jasper was sacked resigned when it emerged that he had written 'flirtatious emails' to a woman who headed up two organisations that had received grants from the Mayor. In his defence, Jasper stated that although he 'had a close bond' with the woman they had not had a sexual relationship.

Now anyone who knows anything about propriety in local government will recognise that as a red herring. It doesn't matter whether he slept with her or not; what does matter is the close friendship, which he did not deny.

Who our friends are is something that we councillors have to consider quite often, in more ways than one. For example, if a close friend submits a planning application which is coming to Neighbourhood Committee for decision, I declare an interest and leave the room when it is being discussed.  Planning officers themselves apply the same maxim and don't handle planning applications submitted by their friends. 

The requirement to declare an interest applies to any item at any council meeting where the 'man in the street' might consider that the relationship with someone would prejudice our judgement. Obviously family members fit into that category, but other people do as well, such as close friends or people closely involved in the political organisation of my ward.

I have in the past asked for advice on what constitutes a 'close friend' in this context. After all, councillors get to know hundreds of people in their wards, and Council business would grind to a halt if we had to declare an interest over matters that affected anyone we had met.

The advice I've been given by senior officers in the Council is that a close friend could be identified as someone with whom you share meals in each others' homes or go on holiday together. That is not an exhaustive definition, but it is clearly someone that you feel emotionally close to.

Lee Jasper seems to think that the only 'interest' that matters is a sexual one. He's wrong, very wrong.

Ken Livingstone has been actively defending Jasper (as you can see here) right up to the point where it became politically expedient to distance himself. It does make many of us question the Mayor's judgement and integrity. 

Last week I chaired a session on Campaigning with Web 2.0 at the International e-Participation Symposium in London.

It was a lively session with excellent speakers: James Crabtree from IPPR, who gave us a broad overview of the American primaries, was followed by two practitioners, Cllr David Speirs who has set up a network of citizens in Bath and North East Somerset, and Steve Webb  MP who has always managed to be ahead of the curve, first with email, then texting and now social networking.

But I recalled how several people, already seasoned Internet users, have asked me to explain exactly what Web 2.0 is. "I don't remember hearing about Web 1.0" is a fairly typical comment.

So I began by showing sites that exemplify the slightly ironic term, including eBay, Wikipedia, Fix My Street, and of course Facebook. What they have in common is content created by the users; networks of information supported by social interaction.

The concept of Web 2.0 was introduced by Tim O'Reilly, a respected IT author and guru, and I like this explanation that he gave in 2005:

Companies that succeed will create applications that learn from their users, using an architecture of participation to build a commanding advantage not just in the software interface, but in the richness of the shared data.

It's a bit geeky, but the idea of an architecture of participation is at the core.

To illustrate just how far we've come, I showed some sites I've developed over the years and the levels of interaction they allowed. I present these with some trepidation - will you believe that the Web was like this such a short time ago?

This was the first site I created, back in 1996, for St Paul's Church, Hook. It was simply a set of pages of information with no opportunity for the visitor to interact. The reason why I'm not showing a campaigning site from that time is because back then there was no such thing on the Web - not a single MP or political party had a website, and the big debate of the day was whether shops should be encouraged to have an online presence. This was one of the first church websites in the country.

Three years later I set up the site for Edward Davey, again one of the first MPs to have a site. The only interactivity on that early site was a contact form. I was credited with helping him to increase his majority from 56 to over 15,000 in 2001, but I have to say that the hit rate in those days doesn't really justify that!

Although e-petitions are being talked up at the moment, many of us have been running online petitions for many years. Here's one from the Kingston Borough Liberal Democrats' site in 2002. I developed Steve Webb's site for him, but can claim no credit for the way in which he set about exploring what email and texting could bring to his campaigns. This dates from 2005, but in the last year he has become so popular on Facebook (with over 2500 friends) that the admins decided that he could not possibly be a real person and closed down his account! - only restored after vigorous protests.

So where are we now in political campaigning? In the States, as James pointed out, most of the clever interactivity of the Internet is utilised to raise funds for candidates. Over here we can concentrate on using it to encourage debate and grow support, but we don't have quite the same incentives as the Americans do to communicate well. The three main parties all need to take their Internet strategies further forward, and I must say I'm proud to belong to a party in which the grassroots membership run the space where we meet and discuss issues.

A mystery...

At Budget Council on Wednesday I picked up a small but significant detail in the main speech given by the Leader of the Conservative Group, Cllr Howard Jones.

He was talking about the Hook Centre, and said that the café was still closed. He then looked up from his printed notes and said that he knew this was no longer true, but was the case when he wrote it.

Now consider these two facts:

• the café reopened on 10th January
• the draft Budget proposals* were published on 28th January

So, it seems he wrote the speech attacking the draft Budget some time before he had actually seen it. That may explain why he did not refer to any of the detail in the Budget as I described earlier this week!

Now he may try the defence that he thought the café was still closed when he wrote the speech. Funnily enough I bumped into him on 30th January, having a pre-arranged lunch with friends. Where? - in the Hook Centre café.

How does that work then?

* The draft Budget consists of over 100 pages packed with detailed figures.

The revelations about child abuse in Jersey have been very disturbing, and will no doubt get worse as more evidence is found and more information is put in the public domain. 

For me they awakened memories from the 50s, 60s and 70s. Not that I suffered any abuse myself, but I feel an irrational guilt about the way abusive behaviour was often considered acceptable then.

It is only in the last twenty years or so that attitudes to children have really changed. The images that haunted my childhood were of other children being beaten or humiliated in front of me. Six year olds spanked in front of the whole school as punishment for bad behaviour; infant school refusers being dragged screaming into assembly, banging their heads horribly on the doors; nine year old boys being caned in front of the class. This was considered acceptable by teachers who were acting 'in loco parentis' - after all, parents could do it in the privacy of their homes.

So violence against children was institutionalised and indeed promoted as the way to produce good citizens.

Child sexual abuse did not, according to popular wisdom, exist - but then sex was not talked about much anyway.

Back in the 70s I was a Governor in an Inner London school (it no longer, exists, by the way). Right at the end of his career the Head was arrested for sexually assaulting a pupil while on a residential trip. It appears this was by no means the only incident. 

Looking back we realised that there had been some attempts at whistleblowing, but the brave whistleblower had been branded a trouble maker and eased out by the Head. (Hm.. it seems something similar happened in Jersey, too)

But what really upsets me now is that the Head, who pleaded guilty, was only given a suspended sentence. Can you imagine that happening now?

This is the context within which the Jersey abuse was happening.  The casual acceptance of violence, coupled with a belief that the damaged children who found their way into children's homes needed 'discipline', created a culture which, sadly, permeated all such institutions at that time. 

How it then slipped in Jersey into a different level of abuse, going far beyond the acceptable limits even of the time, will probably be revealed when all this comes to court. My guess is that one charismatic and physically powerful character established a regime in which more and more extreme forms of 'discipline' were gradually introduced as instruments of control. Each step would have been justified by the failure of previous methods. Of course, such cultures attract and encourage those with an appetite for sexual abuse.

I'm just very grateful that the UK is now a more liberal society. People in general are sensitive to the damage that can be caused to children, and today's youngsters are protected in a way that my generation never were.  Abuse does still happen, and we should all be ready to report it, but the difference now is that beating a child is actually recognised as assault and not dismissed as discipline.